I am starting to see folks saying - ok, so LLMs can do this, what value have you added ? modulo llm is becoming the norm.

Can you elaborate ? Singapore has 4 ethnicities, 4 religions, and 4 languages living together as a developed nation in a small city which could be considered a marvel in any other part of the world. Also, apart from the US, and perhaps UAE, Canada, is the only nation with a policy allowing a sizable skilled immigrant population. With such a diverse set of folks, one could argue that the only common denominator is the cane, a language everyone understands.

> This is mostly a bunch of notes to myself

As Bessis has described in his book [1], it is extremely difficult to understand math someone else has written. The words and symbols dont convey imagery or ideas that the author has in their mind. I was surprised to read in that book that this applied to mathematicians just as it applies to you and I.

Coming back to this article, I wish it were written in the spirit of the essence of linear algebra [2] - conveying the essences in images and pictures instead of words. I am curious to hear from others if they feel this way or is it just me.

[1] Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity

[2] Essence of linear algebra (3Blue1Brown, youtube)

that surprised me too. The intelligence is at the client, and by making that open, anthropic has commoditized the coding agent.

Deepseek v4 flash is priced at 1/10 that of openai/anthropic. I can see a race to the bottom - or perhaps an android vs iphone split - where, the premium market is served by openai/anthropic and there is a long-tail of commodity vendors.

I am waiting for that. Perhaps a taalas kind of high-performance custom hw coding llm engine paired with an open-source coding-agent. Priced like a high-end graphics card which would be pay off over time. It will be a replay of the ibm-mainframe to PC transition of a previous era.

I dont have an llm-radar like you but I felt some anxiety reading through it. Cant explain why but the logic was not linear and this strained me as a reader. It didnt have the obvious llm-isms i see on youtube videos "not this but that". My natural instinct is to make sense of what I read, and if presented with a word-salad, it strains me. What are the empty LLMisms so my radar can be calibrated ? These are some giveaways I could spot.

> The timeline is genuinely absurd

> The timeline sequence description (Feb/March/April) is abstract and does not depict specifics reflecting human understanding.

It is an age-old debate between know-that and know-how. Understanding the world around us is the point of education, and this means ways of looking at it, insights or theories, and how these insights and theories come about which is the critical thinking process. I would like to call it thinking from first assumptions since critical thinking as a term is overused and I would argue that AI is great at critical-thinking in the shallow definition of the term.

It is great to be in a "best-effort" business where there are no consequences for bad things happening. Cybersecurity is one of those businesses. Web search, feeds and ads are another.

Imagine you are selling locks to secure homes. A thief breaks the lock. The lock-maker is not held liable. In fact, they now start selling stronger locks, and lock sales actually improve with more thefts.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47660925

Agree wholeheartedly.

The premise of the bug did not make any sense to me. For instance, "unusable for complex engineering tasks", why would someone who understands these tools use them for complex engineering tasks ? Also, this phrase in the bug appears too jargon-ny "Extended Thinking Is Load-Bearing for Senior Engineering Workflows" - what does this even mean ? Am I the only one who is looking at this with bewilderment. I think there is group of folks producing almost-working proof of concept code with these tools, and will face a reckoning at some point - as the bug illustrates. I see this as a storm in a teacup with wonder and amusement.

There is also a larger commentary on: when you dont understand why things work (ie, have a causal model), you wont know why they broke (find root causes). We are at a point in our craft where we throw magic dust and chant spells at claude and hope and pray it works.

Put Claude on PIP.

yea, there are multiple parts to education. 1) teach skills useful to the economy 2) teach the theories of the subject, and finally 3) tweak existing theories and create new ones. An electrician can fix problems without understanding theory of electromagnetism. These are the trades folks. A EE college graduate has presumably understood some theory, and can apply it in different useful ways. These are the engineers. Finally, there are folks who not only understand the theory of the craft, but can tweak it creatively for the future. These are the researchers.

Bob better fits as a trades-person or engineer whereas Alice fits better as a researcher.

Most of what we call thinking is merely to justify beliefs that emotionally make us happy and is not creative per-se. I am making a distinction between "thinking" as we know it and "creative thinking" which is rare, and can see things in an unbiased manner breaking out of known categories. Arguably, at the PhD level, there needs to be a new ideas instead of remixing the existing ones.

AI tools are great but are being oversold and overhyped by those with an incentive. So, there is a continuous drumbeat of "AI will do all the code for you" ! "Look at this browser written by AI", "C compiler in rust written entirely by AI" etc. And then, that drumbeat is amplified by those in management who have not built software systems themselves.

What happened to the AI generated "C compiler in rust" ? or the browser written by AI ? - they remain a steaming pile of almost-working code. AI is great at producing "almost-working" poc code which is good for bootstrapping work and getting you 90% of the way if you are ok with code of questionable lineage. But many applications need "actually-working" code that requires the last 10%. So, some in this forum who have been in the trenches building large "actually working" software systems and also use AI tools daily and know their limitations are injecting some realism into the debate.

Ironically, the book "Hit Refresh" hit a nerve that every azure web-page has a refresh button. Isnt that dating back to web 1.0 ?

The end-result of this are things like the code leak of claude code presumably caused by ai generated ci/cd packaging code nobody bothered to review since the attitude is: who reviews test or ci/cd code ? If they break big-deal, ai will fix it.